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The Coming of the Son of Man, pt ii Apr 19th 2008

I posted briefly yesterday that I have been reading a book called [The Coming of the Son of Man][1]. I decided that I’d go ahead and put my notes and thoughts down in text to help sort things out. So…this post will start things off with the setup of the book.

[The Coming of the Son of Man][1] approaches eschatology in its original narrative and attempts to keep it in that content. Basically, it looks at NT eschatology as a story within a story within a story, describing and pulling from a variety of historical events — babylonian captivity, Maccabean Revolt, the Hellenization of the Jewish world, the Bar Kokhba uprising, etc. From this, eschatology is read from the first century (and not backwards from ours) and it assumes that the apocalyptic language is meaningful to its time (theirs, not necessarily ours). It also seeks to recognize when and where NT eschatology borrows from the OT (and from this, bringing the prior context into their present context and reapplying it). And finally the apocalyptic language of the NT is read in such a way that a integrated and consistent narrative is built (by reading the authors and their narratives separately and then looking for the ties that bind them together).

All of this setup I appreciated. I’ve shied away from reading much eschatology (outside of *Kingdom of God* theology) because approaches I’ve heard all seem to read from our time looking back, rather than the opposite (and they seem to come up with some fairly wild ideas!). I rather like the idea though of putting the words and language in its original context and letting the text speak for itself. Also by intentionally bringing in the Old Testament prophetic sources and letting them enrich the passages can only help in understanding. These I tend to think are fantastic guiding principles regardless of what you are reading. And in the interest of brevity, I’ll stop here for now. I have a feeling the next post could be longer as it jumps into the narrative itself (in Daniel!). Until then…

[1]:http://www.amazon.com/Coming-Son-Man-Testament-Eschatology/dp/1842272993/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1208547682&sr=8-1

tags: book, eschatology, faith

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